The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of dramatic change within the Ottoman Empire, particularly for the Empire’s millet communities. Like many other imperial subjects, Orthodox Christians under the jurisdiction of the See of Antioch began to renegotiate their relationship with the Sublime Porte in the wake of broader structural changes wrought by Tanzimat reforms and the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The histories of Egypt and the Levant are often disentangled during this period, particularly after the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, but this paper argues that transnational intellectual and social networks of Levantine journalists, intellectuals, and literati who migrated to Egypt and collaborated with their compatriots back in Bilad al-Sham nevertheless reshaped the underlying social contract between the Ottoman state and its subjects. This paper builds on a wealth of scholarship about the intellectual import of Nah?a thinkers by exploring the nexus of ideas and actual communal reforms, and by excavating the intellectual connections and social networks that spanned the Eastern Mediterranean particularly within the Antiochian Orthodox Christian community. Drawing on a variety of Arabic newspapers from Egypt and the Levant, as well as memoirs and church records, this study examines three key areas in which transnational networks of Orthodox intellectuals and social reformers worked to redefine the position of the Antiochian Orthodox community within the Levant: education, communal welfare, and ecclesial representation. Buoyed by modernist discourses on the importance of a scientific education – especially from Levantine-owned Egyptian newspapers – coupled with perceived threats from foreign missionary institutions, Antiochian Orthodox Christians established schools throughout Bilad al-Sham, along with organizations designed to regulate and promote Orthodox schools. Similarly, borrowing on an amalgamation of bourgeoise taste, western social theories of upward mobility, and the integration of the Eastern Mediterranean into a global system of capitalism, Orthodox reformers also stressed the importance of social welfare organizations in the face of insufficient state investment. Finally, it turns to the Arabization of the Antiochian Orthodox Patriarchate in 1898-1899, which ousted the ethnically-Greek Patriarch Spyridon and replaced him with the first Arab Patriarch of Antioch in over 170 years. This move, I argue, relied on new notions on the importance of responsive communal representation cultivated by Antiochians living both in the Levant and Egypt, and highlights the importance of an Arab intellectual and social history that transcends borders and divergent arrangements of state sovereignty.